For the layman, Google is only a Search Engine who also have a Web browser and a free email service (and of course it’s the Youtube and Picasa company). For bloggers and online entrepreneurs, it is an organization to help earn money online and market their products via tools such as AdSense and AdWords. And for the geeks it’s all about Android, Google code, Gears etc.

However, Google is much more than that and it’s getting bigger and bigger day by day. Check out the following free applications and tools which is only a small subset of what Google Labs has today (Sorry for the illogical grouping of desktop apps and web tools)

#1 Google Sketchup

Google Sketchup is a free download program that you can use to build 3D models. It is in fact the scaled down version of the Google Sketchup Pro that costs $495 per license. For most home and personal usage the Sketchup free version would be sufficient. Another important feature of this cool application is the online 3D warehouse that allows you to share, view and use the sketches built by other users. Google owned this product after its acquisition of Last Software in 2006.

#2 Google Building Maker

Google Building Maker is originally part of the Sketchup tool but used more as an addon to the Google Earth plugin. This helps you to draw your own buildings on top of the surface view rendered by Google Earth.

#3 Google Sets

I have talked about Google Sets in the past. This is an extremely handy tool to create a set of related items from examples provided. For example, if you provide AdSense and Bidvertiser as sample set and when you ask for a ‘Large Set’ it provides you a huge list of PPC advertising products. This is particularly useful to do comprehensive research on certain things (e.g. before writing review post about a product, find related products)

#4 Google Web History

Google Web History is part of your Google browser toolbar but people rarely use it. It is an excellent mechanism to remember and catalogue your entire web browsig history. Well, it sounds cool but it can also provide additional intelligence to Google on millions of people’s web usage and this might really help them to start their next business. As such products like browser toolbars are encroaching into your personal browsing space and if they archive your history how could they potentially use it in the future?

#5 Google Flu Trends

Well, Google seem to be feeling responsible for social causes as well and they were quick to react to the Swine flu (and may be other types of flus as well?) pandemic situation. The Flu trends by Google org provides a heat map of the flu spread based on the search intelligence. Not sure how accurate this is but it’s an interesting way of using the search data.

There are several other Google applications and tools such as Google Website Optimizer, Google Gears, Google Moderator etc that are highly underrated and probably need to be talked more about.

If you haven’t yet bookmarked yet, the Google labs is a great place to frequent to understand what might be the next big thing coming out of the Google stable.

Happy Googling!

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This might sound like grandma topic because you have heard it time and again from various sources. However, I am going compile the ingredients to your blogging success once more here – this time as a bullet list because that’s what I do whenever I am ill (been on leave for the whole week and hence not much online activities)

I am grouping the key success factors under four categories – viz blogger, blog and reader related parameters plus external entities. I request you to add other factors as one or two word comments (for a change) here:

Blogger related

#1 Passion

#2 Creativity

#3 Time availability

#4 Commitment

#5 Writing skills

#6 (Social) Networking skills

#7 Style and tone

#8 Technical Abilities

#9 …

Blog Related

#1 Niche

#2 Blog Design

#3 Engagement model

#4 Search Engine Optimization

#5 Frequency of updating

#6 Quality of content

#7 Uniqueness

#8 Content formulation (pillar posts v/s tips v/s news updates)

#9 …

Reader related

#1 What is in it for me?

#2 Age group

#3 Geo group

#4 Visitor proportion (search v/s regulars v/s social media)

#5 Browsing medium (mobile etc)

#6 Reader’s understanding of blog platform / structure

#7 Purpose of visit

#8 …

External Parameters

#1 Google

#2 Social Media

#3 Monetization instruments

#4 Blogging platform and technologies

#5 Technical forums, support

#6 Latest social networking tools

#7 Design trends

#8 Blogging trends (microblogging, vlogging…)

#9 …

Feel free to add more in any of the above categories as comments…

Happy Blogging!

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In the past two years or so, I have been accumulating a list of dofollow blogs mainly with the link building interest in mind. However, due to pressure from my regular job and also from blogging, I wasn’t getting enough time to update this document on a regular basis nor use it effectively for commenting. Hence I thought of moving this list to a database based web application and the result is my new little project – The DoFollow Blogs List.

In a nutshell this Do Follow list is a directory of blogs that follow. However, in the long term, I want to make it slightly different and more appealing.

DoFollow Blogs List – Features

At the moment this new blog directory has the following features:

• 200 dofollow blogs out of the existing 1800 (in the database) have been made public
• Users can browse the listed blogs via categories or custom search
• With the short listed blogs, one can enter ‘Comment mode’ whereby blogs can be browsed one by one within a frame
• Users can submit their dofollow blogs, request to de-list existing entries, report NoFollow or PR mismatch etc.

The blog entries come via submissions, manual entries and a Google crawling process that I am building right now.

Future enhancements

In the mid term future, I want to completely automate the process of sourcing, updating (PR / NoFollow detection) etc. Also, more and more blogs will be added in bulk under various categories and filters (e.g. Users can search only for a particular type – e.g. blogger, Drupal, WordPress etc – of dofollow blog). To detect the PR change, I am trying to setup a cron job but the problem is that periodic pinging of Google APIs can attract a ban.

Another aspect to be improved is the design of the website. I am a pathetic web designer though reasonably good at programming. If you have any suggestion to improve the look and feel, please let me know.

Need your help

Though it’s not a priority project for me, I still need inputs on how this site can be made useful for people. So, please provide your feedback. You may also go ahead submit DoFollow blogs that you know. No issues with duplicates, the system will be automatically filtering out the duplicates and invalid entries.

I hope to make it a directory of 2000 do follow blogs in another three months!

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Link building is a never ending process as your site’s search competency has to be continuously maintained throughout its lifetime. While SEO experts are digging into more and more innovative (but expensive) ways to optimize websites for search visibility, there are quite a few cleaner and rather inexpensive ways by which you can build 1000s of backlinks to your website.

Here in this post I am talking about the free services and products that you can offer in exchange of quality oneway backlinks to your website or blog. Some of these options provide one time benefits where as others can churn out numerous links to your blog/site over time.

How to get backlinks free?

The following are some of the ‘backlinks for free services’ options.

#1 WordPress plugins, badges or widgets

If you can develop catchy and useful badges or widgets (or even plugins that contributes to visual output) and provide it for free, you can also include a backlink to the developer’s site (that’s your blog). The plugin or widget should be compelling enough and adding value to the consumer so that they don’t mind keeping your link there.

#2 WordPress themes

When you buy a professional WordPress theme, you may not like to include a backlink to the developer’s site but if you are consuming a free theme (or get one designed by someone free) the author has every right to get a backlink there in. Hence, even if you are not a theme designer, you can get a nice WordPress theme designed by somebody (for even $50), rebrand it with your backlink and put it for free download. This is one of the easiest and common ways to get quality backlinks to your website.

#3 Write free content

Whether it is guest posting, whole blog content creation or writing work sharing, you could ask for backlinks whenever you are doing this favor for free.

#4 Software and script uploads

Certain collaborative application development or open source support forums allow you to develop applications based on their SDKs and APIs, upload and list them on their sites. Most of the time, this participation model provides a backlink to your website. It may be a onetime thing but the link quality will be really high. You wouldn’t mind receiving a backlink from sites like apple.com right?

#5 Sponsoring blog contests

Sponsoring a blog contest does not mean that you are shelling out a lot of money. Sometimes it is as simple as sponsoring a 125×125 ad spot and in return you get good quality deep links on the contest related posts (announcements, updates and results).

#6 Free webservices

While a free WordPress theme or widget allows the consumer to edit and remove your backlinks, a web service with some visual elements may be a stronger mechanism to enforce your brand and backlinks. However, these web services should be something that adds real value to bloggers or webmasters that they will consume them and in return you get your links.

#7 Free consulting

Providing free consulting (e.g. Software upgrade, configuring plugins, helping to add some script) is another way to get your backlinks free. Most of the less tech-savvy beneficiaries will be glad to provide you backlinks in return of these small favors received from you. Of course, for large scale services, even you might want to accept money than links.

#8 Donate and get backlinks

A number of open source efforts actually provide you quality backlinks (mostly from .org domains) in exchange of smaller donations of $5 or $10 and above. The value of these backlinks is a lot more than that smaller amount that you donate and hence it’s worth a try.

Over to you

The above mentioned are some of the free (almost) backlink procuring mechanisms that come to my mind. Do you have anything more to add?

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The month of October has been exceptionally good for me in terms of blog earnings – thanks to the special offers on OIO Publisher, HostGator and Thesis Theme. Overall, it was a perfect month from other income channels as well which included Google AdSense, private ad sales and paid reviews. I even received a check from AdBrite in the form of referral income after a long gap.

Since majority of my blog income comes from referrals, I thought of writing this post on how a blogger can promote certain products via various conventional as well as innovative advertisement channels in order to maximize his/her referral income. Of course, this month I gave away most of my income as rebates but there was some good learning from this exercise.

How to maximize your referral income?

There are a lot of proven campaign channels that you can use to advertise your offers. Products such as email marketing, facebook or myspace advertising will usually cost you a lot of money. Of course they work, but you have to continuously shell out money to keep those options alive – the moment you stop your campaigns, the sales drop.

I used the following free (well, most of them) mechanisms effectively to improve my referral sales over the past few weeks and these methods are still working for me.

#1 A blog post about the offers

This is one of the first things that you need to do in order to advertise special offers and deals. And I have noticed that most people do this step right by writing an effective offer post.

#2 Using forums

If you are active on certain forums such as Digital Point forums, you can sell your products there via:

• Explicit posts on offers
• Your forum signatures
• Private messages

It is important to check the new posts on forums so that you should be the first one to grab your customers and prospects.

#3 Leverage on your highly ranked pages

Here, I am talking about the pages or posts of your blog that rank high (e.g in top three on Google search). You have to edit the first 100 characters of those posts or edit the post description via All-in-one-SEO post option to include some irresistible four to five words punchline about your offer there. While doing so you have to make sure that the overall relevancy of the post is not damaged via the description change. After that you can republish the post again so that your offer starts getting good click through.

#4 Special offer messages for search users

This is another method whereby you display a customized message to your search users (alone) about deals and offers for your referrals. This works wonders as well, so long as you do not overdo it. You can use certain plugins to achieve this.

#5 Contact commenters

An email campaign can be expensive and sometimes spammy in nature. However, a polite offer message to your past commenters will not do any harm if you do it only once or twice a year. I used my contact commenters plugin to drive my email campaign this time.

#6 Your RSS footer campaign

Using the RSS footer plugin is yet another way to drive you referral campaigns because many RSS readers do not visit your blog very often. Though, it is called a ‘footer’ plugin, in order to get more attention, you might want to show your new offers at the beginning of your RSS post feed. This will increase the hit ratio. Moreover, the RSS aggregators might show the offer on your post excerpt!

#7 Twitter message

Twitter is my least favorite option to drive campaigns as I still consider it as a major spammy social networking mechanism. However, it seem to work as I noticed that some of the referral traffic from twitter actually landed on my offer post (thanks to a couple of twitter friends who RTed it). I do not have a major fan following on twitter and hence this may work well for those who have many good human followers.

#8 Dedicated coupon websites

This needs some investment and periodic updating to be done but once you have traffic to these offer sites, the conversion rates will be very high compared to your regular blog visitors. You need to think a lot about SEO aspects while registering a coupon domain, selecting a theme for it and projecting offers.

#9 Innovative OIO Publisher ad zones

You can have your own customized OIO Publisher text and banner ads on various parts of your blog to improve the referral conversions. For example, instead of a popular 125×125 banner on the sidebar, you may show a text ad at the end of a post or just near the comment entry box for people to notice it better.

#10 Google AdWords campaign

Though I spent very little on AdWords campaign, in principle you can use your attractive offer posts (or even a special landing page) as your AdWords advertisement URL in order to improve your referral or affiliate sales. However, if you want to drive an AdWords campaign you may have to really go for the right set of low cost (low hits as well) keywords rather than high volume and costly keywords. It is really hard to find the right low cost keywords for hosting solutions.

Summary

In principle, if you are a little bit innovative, it is easier to improve your conversion ratios when it comes to the referral or affiliate programs. But be sure to pick the right product to promote rather than putting a ridiculous number of ad banners of low quality products.

Let me know what you think about these tips and if possible share your success stories as well. Please feel free to bookmark this post if you found it useful.

Happy Money Making!

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Earlier this month Technorati changed the algorithm for calculating the rank and authority of its aggregated blogs. Technorati rank was always considered to be one of the yardsticks to assess a blog’s authority but the older system had a lot of drawbacks. This time, it looks like, they have got their act together.

If you haven’t checked your technorati authority or rank recently, I suggest that you do it now. This blog’s new Technorati authority is 414 and the rank is 16154. Let me explain what these numbers mean to us.

Technorati authority and rank

Unlike the older algorithm, the new technorati authority is a value between 0 and 1000 – the higher the value, better the authority. The authority of a blog is calculated based on its linking behavior, blog category and what the blogosphere as well as the other media is talking about the same over a finite period of time. This time frame is not 6 months like it used to be in the older algorithm.

I hated the older authority system because people could manipulate it by link exchanges and blogroll entries. Also, since the six month window was always predictable, you had a chance to link back from sites that were going out of this six months (or 180 days) window. A lot of smaller blogs without any good content used to manipulate the authority.

One more important thing about the new authority system is that a blog can have more than one authority if it falls in multiple categories. For example, if your blogs come under ‘Technology’ and ‘Business’ categories, you could have two authority numbers. Unfortunately, the category is not something that a claimant can select.

Technorati rank is basically your blog’s rank among the authority of all blogs in the technorati directory. 1 is considered the highest rank and these numbers don’t duplicate as in the case the authority number. i.e. a number of blogs can have the same authority but no two blogs will have the same rank in one category. By the way, just like the technorati authority, you can have multiple ranks based on your listed category. This blog’s rank of 16514 means that it ranks at that position among the 853,799 blogs indexed, at the time of proof reading this post.

How to get high technorati authority & rank?

As I mentioned earlier, the blogroll linking does not play any role in deciding your technorati authority. However, deep linking has a bigger role here when you consider links from other blogs. The other aspect is the external non-blog links such as social media – social bookmarking and RSS directory links to your blog posts.

Becoming a ‘technorati fan’ of some blog was a major thing in the past and that was a deciding factor for determining the technorati rank. However, the little heart symbol indicating the love received (Check it here) is no more displayed while technorati claims that they still count the love coming in from 100s of thousands of technorati badges in the blogosphere.

Another important thing that may be counted is the comments on your technorati listing. Just like Alexa – which has visitor comments on your site info page – Technorati seems to count the comments on each claimed blogs in your account in order to determine the ranks (By the way, if you want to comment on this blog’s listing on technorati, please do so by visiting this link. This favor will be returned unless your blog has some rated or illegal content)

Flaws and incomplete features

Though, technorati has been working hard on their new site, features and ranking algorithms, there are still a lot of concerns. I heard a lot of complaints that some accounts have lost their claimed blogs or they are unable to claim them. Also, technorati is yet to provide a consistent mechanism to choose tags about blogs. At the moment, one can put anything out their at the risk of loosing the authority or rank.

But I really liked their new search mechanism which is a lot faster while searching for blogs as well as blog posts. Earlier, the search and the general performance of the technorati site was pathetic.

Summation

Though ranking systems such as Alexa and Technorati have their pitfalls, at the end, the stake holders (venture capitalists, sponsors, advertisers, co-bloggers, potential buyers etc) of your blog need to have some way to assess the authority of your blog. Technorati, at the moment, is one such mechanism and hence any step towards improving the system needs appreciation.

Over to you…

Have you checked your technorati authority/rank lately? If so, please share it here. Also, please provide your valuable inputs on how you see the new system going to work or even any means to tweak it.

Blogosphere rocks!

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Today I would like to review the Queryads ad network which is an exciting PPC program with a difference for so many reasons. The most interesting thing about this product is that it actually taps into the traffic generated by realtime search engine queries. This means that instead bidding on generic keywords, Queryads lets its advertisers bid on real search phrases that targets high quality and relevant content.

Queryads is a total ad solution which means that it has tools and reporting features to cater to the needs of its advertisers as well as publishers. Publishers of Queryads stand to make money where as the advertisers get maximum value for the money spent on their PPC campaigns using targeted key phrases.

Publisher advantages

As a Queryads publisher you have a lot of advantages over similar PPC ad networks. First of all it guarantees at least 10 cents per every click on your ad units. But wait, the best thing about Queryads is that it actually pays you 80% of what it takes from the advertisers. The 80-20 split is probably the best you can get in PPC advertising.

The publishers of this network get to choose standard ad sizes (large/medium rectangles, square ads, skyscrapers, leaderboards and other standard web banner sizes) while the ads themselves blend well with your web content. The alternative ad code section allows you to use it along with other PPC text ads (e.g. AdSense) to make sure that you show relevant ads without any conflict of interest or ToS.

The publishers are paid first of every month via PayPal when the minimum payout level of $50 is reached. The sign up process is fast and easy and you can add all your quality websites under one account. Overall Queryads is a great AdSense alternative for publishers.

Queryads for Advertisers

Realtime targeted key phrases and long tail keywords mean excellent value proposition for advertisers and that is what Queryads offers. Advertisers of the PPC program can take full control over their campaigns via automatically availing search trend reports, newer keywords and save time digging keywords. Queryads also protects its advertisers from click fraud as it has information about the actual search traffic to the publisher sites. There is no need to worry about your ads being displayed on sites with objectionable content as the publisher sites go through an approval process.

Other salient features & Conclusion

Another important aspect about the Queryads PPC product is the simplicity of its user interface for both publishers and advertisers. Once you are an approved publisher, in a matter of minutes you will be hosting your ads and for advertisers it is even faster.

Overall, this PPC advertising product promises great prospects for your online campaigns as well as make money objectives. Now, what’s preventing you from giving it a try?

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Fine, 90% of your organic traffic comes from Google search and not from Microsoft bing, Yahoo or other entities. But it wouldn’t hurt if you can get a little more search traffic on top of what you already receive, right? Here are some bing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips as documented by the official bing blog.

(Before applying these tips, check if your blog is already getting 6% to 8% of the overall search traffic from bing. If so, there is not much room for optimization as it almost already reflect the bing market share)

Factors that affect (any) SEO

Regardless of whether you are optimizing for Google, Yahoo or bing, there are these following parameters that finally dictate where your pages rank:

• Content quality & uniqueness
• The domain age
• Backlinks and authority of the page
• Neighborhood pages
• Title, meta keyword, content relevancy

Prerequisites to get considered by bing

Even before you start optimizing your content check if your blog satisfies the following prerequisites to help the bing bot crawl and index your site.

1. Submit your blog/site to bing: Use the following URL to submit your blog to bing. If you had already submitted your website to MSN earlier, chances are you are automatically indexed by bing as well. Anyhow, it doesn’t harm if you submit again.
Submit your site to bing

2. Verify at bing webmaster central: Use the bing webmaster central to add your blog and its sitemap there in. Do not forget to verify your site using the XML verification process mentioned there in.

3. Upgrade your Google XML Sitemap plugin: If you are using an old Google XML sitemap plugin on your blog, your post updates may not be alerting the bing search bot to crawl your blog. Hence you need to update the plugin and make sure that ‘Notify bing’ option is checked.

4. Robot.txt: Make sure that you are not blocking the bing/MSN bots via any robot.txt entries.

Bing SEO tips

Now, let me summarize the optimization tips that I got to read on the bing official blog.

#1 Construct good HTML

bing seems to give more weightage to the critical HTML parts such as the page title, meta keywords (much more weightage than Google) and H1 tags. It is a must to have relevant keywords in those three areas to get the bing bot understand the importance of your pages.

#2 User’s language in keywords

For bing, it is important to use those key phrases that people actually use to search than the hyped ones such as ‘Make Money Online’.

#3 Create location aware content

Unlike Google, the geo-targeting is not something that can be forced on bing via some settings alone. Bing uses on page information to geographically categorize content. Hence if your business is located in a particular town, make sure to use the name of that town (and address on relevant pages) on your pages and meta keywords tag.

#4 Backlinks from authority sites

Just like Google, the backlinks play a role in deciding the authority of your site. Hence you have to have quality backlinks coming in from authority sites and the relevancy of the anchor text is given more importance than the page rank of the originating sites.

#5 Have good number of outbound links

Due to the monetization models around links, Google degrades pages that have dofollow (ie. without rel=nofollow) outbound links. However, as long as the content linked to are relevant with respect to the anchor text, bing loves pages that are linked to relevant content. No dofollow or nofollow worries in this case! In this particular case it’s a toss up between bing and Google. There is more weightage when you are linking to older and established domains (neighborhood matters).

#6 Simplify your site or blog

If your site or blog is heavy on rich internet application technologies (flash, too much of javascript, silverlight etc), chances are the bing bot is confused. Try to minimize the use of such technologies – not just within your blog content but be choosy on your plugins and extensions as well.

#7 Remove trailing ‘/’ from domain name

While internally linking as well as doing offsite SEO, make sure that you simplify your home URL as much as possible by removing the trailing ‘/’. Sometimes, the url with slash and the one without slash (e..g. http://www.dollarshower.com/ and http://www.dollarshower.com) are considered two entities and hence causing dilution of your backlink equity.

#8 Convert all URLs to lowercase

Due to much the same reason as mentioned above, you may convert all your URLs to lowercase for all reference and link building purposes (e.g. http://mysite.com/About to http://mysite.com/about).

#9 Simple and easy to read URLs

Use your permalink structure to keep all your links as human and bot readable ones. URLs containing too many numbers, port number, non-alphabetical characters are not very readable by bots in order to obtain valuable indexing information and relate to their contents.

Also, absolute linking (http://www.dollarshower.com/about) rather than relative path linking (./about) seems to be of help to the bots.

#10 Domain age and landing page content

Older the domain, the more authority you have in the eyes of bing (also true with Yahoo) where as it is fairly easy to tweak your site to high authority when you are trying to achieve Google SEO. Bing also value unique content on landing pages.

At the end it is boiling down to older domain, unique content, good neighborhood and relevant text in key HTML tags.

Happy SEO!

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Note: The following offer has been extended till December 31, 2009!:

It’s Thanks Giving & Diwali month and here’re some exciting offers on OIO Publisher, HostGator hosting and DIY Thesis theme exclusively from DollarShower. Through out this month, for all purchases of the above products via our referral links, I am going to refund (Email-in-rebate via PayPal) you most of what I get as referral commission.

The products that I am promoting are the best in their respective categories and now you can get them at throwaway prices! It is just my Diwali or Thanks Giving gift to all readers of my blog. See below for the details of these offers (valid till 31 October 2009)

#1. OIO Publisher for $23.50

Here’s how you can get your OIO Publisher Ad management plugin for $23.50 (original price $47) or 50% off.

• Purchase your OIO Copy by clicking on the affiliate banner below. This gives you an immediate discount of $10 via coupon code ‘TERRA-OCTOBER’
• Contact me via the contact form with your OIO Publisher User ID and PayPal email address
• You will receive a PayPal refund of $13.50 on the same day!

#2. $21 and $41 discounts on DIY Thesis Theme!

Thesis is undoubtedly the best coded WordPress theme ever but one could argue that it’s priced a bit high! Well, not any more!! You could now get $21 off the Personal edition (originally priced $87) and $41 off the Developer edition (Actual price $164) by following the instructions below.

• Purchase the Thesis theme by clicking on the affiliate banner below (You might want to clear the browser cookies)
• Once the order and payment is completed, contact me via the contact form specifying your Thesis theme Invoice ID, theme edition type purchased and paste the PayPal invoice details
• You will receive a PayPal refund of $21 or $41 (as applicable) within seven days, once the referral details are verified
• Please note that the referral logic is not always foolproof mechanism. If you had clicked Thesis banners elsewhere before, chances are you bought your theme through them. Please claim your rebates from those referrals in that case – most people these days give you a cut of their referral income

#3. Upto 60% OFF on HostGator and How?

DollarShower runs on HostGator and it is the best in the shared hosting category in terms of excellent customer support, max server up-time and low pricing (if purchased via a deal like ours). Here’s how you can get the best possible deal on Host Gator hosting!

• Signup with HostGator by clicking on the affiliate banner below (You might want to clear the browser cookies)
• Use the coupon code ‘AUTUMN‘ without quotes to get an immediate 20% off on your first invoice. This coupon has to be entered before you complete the order
• Once the order and payment is completed, contact me via the contact form specifying your HostGator Transaction ID, Domain name for which the hosting plan was purchased and also paste the PayPal invoice details
• You will receive a PayPal refund of $25 in 61 to 90 days if you are verified as our referral
• Just in the case of any referral purchase on the web, if you have clicked on other banners for purchase, you may not be a valid referral of mine

Example scenario:
Assume that you sign up for a hatchling (cheapest plan) hosting product. This costs you $4.95 per month and hence 12 x 4.95 = $59.4 for one year. Due to the standard coupon code ‘AUTUMN’ (available for all by HostGator) you get a 20% discount ie. $11.88. You get an additional $25 rebate from me and hence instead of $59.4 you end up paying only $22.52 for one whole year! – i.e a whopping 62% OFF!!

(Note: Send me a mail to check if further rebates are available. Sometimes it can be totally FREE hosting!)

Please note that it is better to sign up for at least one year because the 20% OFF discount is available ONLY on your first bill and not for renewals!

In the case of HostGator, we need 61 to 90 days to process the rebates, because in some cases the first month of hosting is free and HostGator pays me after two months! But I guarantee you the rebate if you are a valid referral!

The Hatchling plan ($4.95 per month) by Host Gator allows you to host only one domain per account where as the Baby plan ($7.95 per month) allows unlimited number of domain names to be hosted within one account! If you are moving your blog hosting to Host Gator, they will help you to move it for free!

Enjoy your OIO Publisher, HostGator service and DIY Thesis theme!

(PS: Some of my offers may be valid beyond the month of October as well)

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Blog Search Engine is a little bit obsolete term these days because not many people really use blog search mechanisms to find information and updates from the blogosphere. For most practical purposes, a popular seach engine such as Google or Bing would be sufficient to get you what you are looking for. This is one reason why Yahoo’s blog search project was withdrawn some time back and Google blog search is not well used either.

However, these days, when you refer to blog search engines, you actually mean those popular blog & RSS aggregators. Unlike pure blog search mechanisms they add a lot of value to their search users as well as bloggers because of the following reasons.

Advantages of Blog aggregators

First of all, the blog aggregators usually depend on the ping mechanism that the blog platform provides and the RSS/Atom feeds of the blog in order to update their search data. Since this process does not involve any complicated crawling or indexing mechanism, the blog updates are reflected much faster than the indexing process of your popular search engine.

Secondly, blog aggregators bring in referral visits rather than search visits. Typical search visitors are reaching your blog via keywords where as referrals from blog or RSS aggregators are coming in mostly after reading an excerpt of your blog post. This would basically mean more valuable visitors and low bounce rate. I should add here that sometimes the traffic from blog aggregators comes via tags as well.

Thirdly, blog aggregators mostly trust the quality of content, the authority of the blog and freshness of the posts to drive traffic where as traditional search engines results can be tweaked via Search Engine Optimization technics.

Top blog aggregators & search services

The following are the list of top blog search engines/aggregators. Some of them allow you to create an account and add your blog feeds there while others allow you to ping them for updates (Read: WordPress ping list) or purely search for contents. It is possible that some of these services can bring in some traffic to your blog via their feed reader options or search mechanism itself or tags.

#1 Technorati
Needless to say, technorati is on top of my list as it combines aggregation services, blog search, blogosphere’s topmost ranking mechanism and top 100 blog list. Technorati’s speed (did they ever care about that?) and search feature itself may not be all that great but its other features compensate for that. Also, it can filter SERPs based on tags, language, authority etc.

#2 Google Blog Search
Google Blog search is still around and it serves the purpose of a pure blog search engine. Usually, your blog posts appear on Google blog search even before it appears on Google’s main search. I mainly use Google blog search to check the hot queries in the blogosphere.

#3 Sphere
Sphere’s blog search is extremely fast and relevant. In fact, you have the option of quickly reshuffle the search results for relevancy or time.

#4 Ask.com blog search
Just like Sphere, Ask blog search also lists content based on relevance, time or popularity. However, it is not the fastest blog search engine you can find around.

#5 Bloglines
Bloglines is mainly known as as an online feed reader service but they also have a decent blog search engine. It allows blog search results filter for popularity, relevance and date. Further, the popularity of the feed can be fitered based on subscriptions.

Closing remarks

Although I do not expect many of these speciality blog search mechanisms to survive for long, the effort along these lines needed some appreciation and that’s why this post. I am just wondering how people will be searching for information in the future especially along various searchable entities (blog posts, images, videos, news etc). What’re your thoughts?

Happy Blogging!

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